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SERGEANT DARK

SERGEANT DARK

$21.00Price

ISBN: 979-8-9890965-7-2

Pub Date: Sept. 2025

Pages: 94


By Henry Hughes


Henry Hughes’ fifth book of poems, Sergeant Dark, carries us to the edge of the war in Ukraine and deep into Antarctica. These poems take us out shark fishing and bird watching, and into the bar and bedroom. They offer honest, humorous and hard looks at everyday life—love, marriage, parenting, money, religion, sports and politics—celebrating the joys and admitting the failures.  “Hughes’ poems are conscious of the destruction and ‘heady wastes’ we humans make,” writes Annie Lighthart, but “they will not let go of the truth at the other end of the line—that the world is still vividly living and vividly loved.”


Sergeant Dark is Henry Hughes’ best book to date. It’s a book where the inner self, the inescapable contours of the psyche, and the mesmerizing feelings we hold most dear emerge from stories of love and fear, desire and heartbreak, and the daily considerations. Life’s complexities are not, however, reduced to convention. Instead, thankfully, we have astute, painstaking, sublime precision­—the peculiar, singular, and offbeat—that are the undisputed roots of lyric poetry.

—David Biespiel


In the marvelous Sergeant Dark, meditations on ice fishing—its “red sonar smears” and “black and yellow wavelengths”—fuse with Kandinsky’s “Blue Rider.” The poet’s time in Antarctica and Southeast Asia mingles with startlingly clear portraits of a marriage’s soft conflicts. Hughes writes with an attunement and egolessness that feels daring and urgent. His visions illustrate life’s strange pivots, our contemporary moment, the idea that “morning is not a time, it’s a condition.”

—Paula Bohince


    Sergeant Dark is an accomplished, wonderful collection, delivered with a wealth of skill and an array of turns of studied empathy and observation, as if casting out into light, pulling images, field notes, lyric observation and storied reflection, from the cracks and fissures of a world of relations, with an elegance of lines, drawing wonder and delight from grim remainders of grief and better reminders of the revelatory in small moments. Sergeant Dark is one of the finest collections I’ve read in years.

     —Gordon Henry


    With clear-eyed, muscular language, Henry Hughes’ fantastic new poetry collection Sergeant Dark sinks into the brain like a valuable map. From a pine shack in Ukraine to the Southern Ocean, Long Island, and slushy ice-fishing huts up north, the remarkable poems in Sergeant Dark guide us, each poem awake to both absurdity and beauty. The visceral world is alive in this book, and though Hughes’ poems are conscious of the destruction and “heady wastes” we humans make, they will not let go of the truth at the other end of the line—that the world is still vividly living and vividly loved. 

    —Annie Lighthart


    Henry Hughes grew up on Long Island, New York, and he has lived in Oregon since 2002. He is the author of five poetry collections, including Men Holding Eggs, which received the Oregon Book Award, and Moist Meridian, which was a finalist for the award. His memoir, Back Seat with Fish, was selected as “Best of the Year” in The Guide to Outdoor Literature. A recipient of a Mellon Foundation Grant in literature, the Oberon Poetry Prize, and the Oscar Wilde Award, his poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, North American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Seattle Review, Shenandoah, and Sewanee Review. For over twenty years, he’s been a regular reviewer for Harvard Review, and he edited the Everyman’s Library anthologies, The Art of Angling, Fishing Stories, River Poems, and River Stories. Hughes teaches literature and writing at Western Oregon University and directs Write Place: Literature, Arts & the Environment.

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